Simon's Blog

As part of the Mbuti pygmy people, Ota Benga lived in the Congo Free State. As he was out hunting for animals, his tribe was attacked by King Leopold II of Belgium to exploit the supply of rubber in Congo. Benga's wife and his two children were murdered. Benga was later captured and was sold to an American businessman Samuel Phillips Verner who had traveled to Africa to capture pygmies for the World Fair. Verner then took Benga to the Bronx Zoo where William Hornaday, director of the zoo, recruited Benga to help maintain the animal habitats. However, when he saw that people took more notice of Benga than the animals, he created an exhibition to feature Benga. Benga was placed in the Monkey House exhibit and was encouraged to shoot his bow and arrow at various targets. African Americans protested the exhibit and James H. Gordon said, “our race is depressed enough without exhibiting one of us with the apes. We think we are worthy of being considered human beings, with souls.” Toward ...

Peter Kropotkin was a Russian revolutionary, anarchist, and activist who advocated for a decentralized society built upon self-governing communities and worker-run enterprises. Deeply skeptical of capitalism, he argued that the system inherently manufactured poverty and scarcity to generate wealth for the privileged. For Kropotkin, "surplus value" itself was the core issue; he maintained that a society remains unjust if workers merely retain their own industry's surplus rather than redistributing it for the common good. His observations of cooperative tendencies among indigenous peoples led him to conclude that human nature is not rooted solely in competition. He observed that many pre-industrial and pre-authoritarian societies actively guarded against the accumulation of private property—often through traditions that redistributed a person’s possessions to the community upon their death. In his 1892 seminal work, The Conquest of Bread, Kropotkin proposed an economic sy...